I've got a pair of 4x500mghz CPU 4gb ram 2x 73gb disk origin 300s, a numa cable and irix media. Trying to get this party started. Anyway, on console power up (see below) I am informed that 3 fans are failing and so the system shuts down. A look inside (see picture) shows missing fans. Same story on both nodes. How many do I really need? Where would I connected them if I had them? Can I disable this check and just put any old fans in there to keep it cool? Thoughts?

tstover wrote:Can I disable this check and just put any old fans in there to keep it cool? Thoughts?

You could disable environmental monitoring, but I wouldn't recommend it.

It is possible to use other fans, viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16718040& but I'd suggest checking that the current set are tightly connected. If the connection isn't suspect you might want to test the fans with an external power source and the fan connections in the O300 with a DMM. Having the same fans fail in both O300s seems little unusual to me. What do you know about their history?

The picture is a little misleading. What you see is actually just the fan mounting bracket. The fans are absent. I bought these used with the claim that they were pulled from a working environment. I think either the fans were salvaged, or perhaps there were other fans in the cabinet or something. Is it possible to leave the environmental monitoring of the temperatures, just not the fans? That way as long as I was cooling it somehow it might run ok. I'm not sure where the fans would connect to. Is there a header on the motherboard, or power supply? Anyone know?

* The fans are connected to headers on the mainboard, under the black foam shroud.* Recondas posted a link to a post by me, I'd just like to say the those fans are no longer sold. You'll find something similar. Just keep in mind the three wires are ordered differently vs. what you find in most PCs, so you'll have to pry the wires from the replacement fan out of it's connector and re-arrange them. I no longer have the O300 so I can't help there ...* If you can get an L1 prompt on the console port, you can do 'env off' to switch of monitoring. I sure hope you won't do that without pointing some sort of blower at the open chassis, or you will fry the system

Good luck!

Now this is a deep dark secret, so everybody keep it quiet It turns out that when reset, the WD33C93 defaults to a SCSI ID of 0, and it was simpler to leave it that way... -- Dave Olson, in comp.sys.sgiCurrently in commercial service: (2x) In the museum: almost every MIPS/IRIX system.Wanted: GM1 board for Professional Series GT graphics (030-0076-003, 030-0076-004)

So other than a different pinout, "regular" 3 wire pc fans can be used? I'll give this a try later. How did you figure out which pin is what? I suppose 2 of the 3 will be the DC power so it's probably not that hard to get it wrong. Now to dumpster dive for 6 fans...

Well, I had the original fans, and the wires are red, black & yellow in both cases so that was straight forward.

The fans have to move a certain volume of air (CFM) or you risk overheating the system, and they have to run at a minimum RPM or you'll trigger the environmental monitoring. The original fans are type NMB Minebea 3110KL-04W-B79.

Now this is a deep dark secret, so everybody keep it quiet It turns out that when reset, the WD33C93 defaults to a SCSI ID of 0, and it was simpler to leave it that way... -- Dave Olson, in comp.sys.sgiCurrently in commercial service: (2x) In the museum: almost every MIPS/IRIX system.Wanted: GM1 board for Professional Series GT graphics (030-0076-003, 030-0076-004)

tstover wrote: I How many do I really need? Where would I connected them if I had them? Can I disable this check and just put any old fans in there to keep it cool? Thoughts?

My thought is you are entering brave new territory here. Sorry. I don't think you can put any old fans in there.

as the GOBI, recondas wrote:You could disable environmental monitoring, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Seconded.

tstover wrote:So other than a different pinout, "regular" 3 wire pc fans can be used? I'll give this a try later. How did you figure out which pin is what? I suppose 2 of the 3 will be the DC power so it's probably not that hard to get it wrong. Now to dumpster dive for 6 fans...

I am not an expert here but the Fuel is a workstation of the same era as your Origin 300s are as servers. I suspect that the way things work is that the power supplies of machines of that era (Fuel, Tezro, Origin/Onyx 3xx) have circuits leading back to the power supply and the L1 monitoring. It senses the load or rpm with pwm(*) and the designers knew that load X meant an rpm of Y on the fan. If you found fans with the same electronic characteristics as those NMB Minebea 3110KL-04W-B79 present in the Origin 300s and they fit, you are in business. In the nekochan wiki article on Fuel PSU repair ( here ).

In the wiki it is wrote:Pin 12: This is FANC, it should control fan speed. Read more belowPin 24 This is FANM, it monitors fan speed. Connect to tachyometer pin on fan:....The FANC on pin 12 doesn't appear to work as expected. I expected that the wire would go directly to the fan header inside the PSU, but it looks like its going into one of the IC's, but I'm not sure. The FANC line stays put at +3.3V even when the system if powered down. This might be to low to start the fan from the PSU. Which might indicate that it is just a signal wire to a fan controller in the PSU.. but I don't know.. perhaps a good reason to get my oscilloscope out.

The fuel is merely from the same era. It may not work that way. But I hope I give you the courage to investigate and document.

People here in the past have replaced fans in Octanes and the like merely because they are too loud.

This is an opportunity to learn something about Origin 3(x)0 fans and power supplies and share it as wiki article.

If the O300 uses the same non-standard 3-pin fan connector header as the Fuel and Origin 350, there's a photo of a spliced fan wire connection at the bottom of the Fuel Hardware Aggregator (the Aggregator might be of further interest to you as the Fuel and O300 are both IP35 at the software level): viewtopic.php?t=9046&f=3#p136996

As jan-jaap already mentioned, when sourcing fans the other thing to check is the RPM rating of the replacement fan. The "Warning RPM" level for your O300s is 2160 RPM, if the replacement fans run any slower than that you'll still run into issues with the L1 controller automatically shutting down the system. I recently added some low-noise variable speed fans to an O350, even though the minimum speed rating for the variable speed fans was above the warning rpm level, they still generated fan warnings during a cold start because the replacement fans had an integral thermostat and didn't spin up until a certain temperature was reached.